Blog
Signs of Life: On Location
EC: Your work tends to deal with cataloging and honoring the past while giving the viewer/participant an opportunity to find and discover anew. To me, creating this work would seem a helpful way to acclimate to new surroundings. How does your current work influence your sense of home?
MJ: I always try to make work in and of the locations where I live. Before moving to New York I made a number of site-specific collections and photographic series in the region I grew up (very rural and green towns). Even when I am living in a location for a week, at a hotel for instance, I end up making a work about my surroundings, perhaps as a way to process and understand the new space.
When I moved back to New York City I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try and make work with the same techniques of exploring natural spaces and collection. Working in the woods and with found objects is almost a given in the post-industrial towns where I grew up, but in Manhattan, I wasn't sure if it would be possible or interesting. But after two years working on "Nowhere In Manhattan" and numerous other projects in Brooklyn and Queens, I now feel like I know the hidden landscapes of then city better then most natives. There is a very good chance that all this exploration is instigated by the fact that New York City may be my home for a very long time and if that is the case, then I best know it as well as I knew the forests and streams of my hometown.
EC: Tell us about the connections between your "Nowhere in Manhattan" project and your upcoming "Signs of Life" walk?
MJ: The first part of "Nowhere in Manhattan" was the exploration and documentation phase. I wanted to have somewhat rigorous experiences in all of Manhattan's existing green spaces. The residue of this process, apart from the photographic series, is a strange knowledge of the terrain that goes beyond the trails: first-hand stories, surprises, scares, discoveries and really magical happenings–all of which need to be shared on-location.
"Signs of Life" will take place on April 30, May 1, May 7 and May 8 at 1pm. Click here for more info.
Brooklyn Bridge Forever Extended
On October 15th, Chiara Bernasconi, Kamomi Solidum and I met at the base of the bridge to give the final incarnation of the “Brooklyn Bridge Walk”. We had each planned our parts so as to play the bridge according to our own scores. We planned that the 3 participants who had signed up would each choose an artist to walk with.
Chiara, in a cast from a broken bone in her foot, had planned to ask her participant to physically assist her in walking over the bridge. I was going to walk quietly hand-in-hand with a participant over the bridge. Kamomi had planned to ask existential questions of her participant in concert with their place/position on the bridge.
We were all set. But the strong winds, we think, kept our participants from showing up. What to do? Our walk was delayed yet again.
After debating whether to continue the walk ourselves that nite, find strangers on the street to walk with us or cancel it altogether, we decided to continue the walk on our own terms. We thought it best to separately complete our part of the walk with a participant of our choosing in our own time, and we'll write about it here. Details forthcoming:)
photo: Ariel Rivera
Elastic City in The Economist
Tour de chance
Oct 6th 2010, 10:09 by E.B. | NEW YORK
lead photo: Kate Glicksberg
Read the article on The Economist's site
VISITING a city can feel like an adventure. Tourists often enjoy a heightened awareness of sights and smells, sounds and people. But for residents, much of this becomes routine—dulled by time, muted by circumstance. We are often blind to what we see everyday.
This, at least, is the guiding principle of Elastic City, a new company that offers a series of conceptual walks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and occasionally London. Founded by Todd Shalom, a Brooklyn-based poet and “sound artist”, these walks encourage participants to consider the city in a different way—by listening to the noises it makes, exploring the materials it’s made from and discovering its unexpected pockets of beauty. The aim is to feel like a traveller. Or, Mr Shalom explains, to “take poetry off the page”.
What this means in practice has varied from walk to walk over the course of Elastic City’s inaugural season, which began in May and concludes on October 17th. For a walk called “Brighton Zaum”, Mr Shalom led a group on an acoustic tour of a remote, Russian neighbourhood. City residents are often besieged by noise, he explained, yet the sounds we make or perceive are often subject to choice. He asked participants to walk silently and listen intently, to notice the sounds of the city as its own poetry. The quiet was an unexpected reprieve, coaxing into high relief the sigh of buses, the ripple-rattle of plastic bags and the occasional squeal of a train. The smell of smoked fish wafted importantly (listening closely intensified other senses). The walk ended with writing a poem in the sand of Brighton Beach as the sun set. The doggerel itself was silly, but the earned intimacy of the group felt startlingly sincere.
Mr Shalom has recruited experts and artists in other fields to create their own walks. For an excursion called “Homesickness”, for example, an Israel-born urban designer and “environmental psychologist” led a small group through Chinatown and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The idea was to consider notions of displacement in an area associated with generations of immigrants. The tour began in Columbus Park on a Sunday, when amateur Chinese opera singers perform in the open air. One participant from Malaysia shared that this is where he comes to treat his own pangs of homesickness. “These songs are all about suffering. Like my aunts boasting about their suffering over tea,” he observed. Others on the tour never knew the park existed.
Mr Shalom describes these walks as “performative”, yet suggests they are a genre unto themselves. He has a point. These experiences are rare for being educational, interactive and personal. The artists often encourage moments of introspection and even vulnerability among participants, who may be asked to walk with eyes closed, make the sound of an inanimate object or trace the wall of a building with one’s hands. That such behaviour sounds regressive may be part of its appeal. With the right motivation, it can be satisfying to flout conventional codes of behaviour out in the open.
Together with Juan Betancurth, a Colombian-born artist, Mr Shalom is putting the final touches on “Lucky Walk”, the last tour of the season, which will debut on October 9th as part of New York’s Art in Odd Places festival. The walk, which considers the power of rituals and superstitions, includes moments of walking backwards, making wishes and buying lottery tickets. Participants meet at the Manhattan intersection of 13th Street and 7th Avenue, naturally.
The concept of luck—and specifically good luck—seems apt for Mr Shalom, whose Elastic City has enjoyed enough success for him to be making plans for the next season.
How to Become a Saint Without Dying While You Try
Juan Betancurth, who is leading the Lucky Walk for Elastic City with Todd Shalom, has created a series of works entitled "How to Become a Saint Without Dying While You Try". These series include ritualistic performances, objects and installations that explore Juan's personal relationship to "pain, faith and pleasure" through experiences from his past.
From Juan's website:
"For a long time, I've been fascinated with the lives of Catholic saints, and the extremes they will go to, in order to achieve a mystical experience. The saints understood their bodies as simple flesh, that needs to be mortified to cleanse itself from the desires of the body. In their fanatic search for perfection I found an intriguing relationship between faith, pain and pleasure, three elements I've come to see as recurrent themes throughout my life, while creating this body of work. I began to look back at practices of mortification throughout the history of the Catholic religion, where I found powerful and beautiful tools, used by believers, to inflict pain upon themselves. Through these objects, I became interested in the person behind them, and realized that inside the mind of a saint, is someone who keeps a sadomasochistic relationship with god, who loves, punishes and rewards.
Pain becomes a doorway, feeding the compulsion to relieve the soul from desires of the flesh, to reach the spiritual ecstasy of touching the holy body, to reach god, and have an erotic encounter with him. I read stories of nuns spending nights hanging from their hair to receive spiritual visions; of a village drunk who became a saint by pledging to wear weights under his clothes for the rest of his life in exchange for being healed; a mystic nun who wrote erotic poems to god as she flagellated herself in front of his image; of some who endured long periods of fasting and others who subjected themselves to public humiliation. The more that I know about these people, the more fascinated I become.
Observing the popularity of tortured lives of mystics, I began to draw a connection to the society of drama and spectacle that we are immersed in, where suffering sells, and brings ratings up. I find it interesting that common heroes are still made from those who have suffered in the public eye, bringing me to a sarcastic point of view on our society, myself included, while I use my own story as the subject of my art."
You can send an email here to be notified of Juan's future performances.
photo: Malo de la Tullaye